Rule and Ruin

Gather 'round children, and hear of a time when the Republican party ran the spectrum from conservative to progressive, and they did not think as a reactionary monolith, arguing over who is more conservative. From the days of Eisenhower, and going all the way back to its origins in the 1850s, Republicans were all types, from the very progressive Theodore Roosevelt to the conservative Robert Taft. But today, the moderate Republican is about as plentiful as the ivory-billed woodpecker. Gregory Kabaservice, in his well-researched if a little starchy Rule and Ruin, writes that this has been the undoing of the party.

Kabaservice, I take it, longs for the days of moderate Republicans--perhaps he is one himself. He doesn't hide his disdain for the dilemma the G.O.P. faces: "While there are many possible reasons to explain the present American political dysfunction, the leading suspect is the transformation of the Republican Party over the past half-century into a monolithically conservative organization." He argues that, unlike Democrats, who have a diversity that includes Joe Manchin to Barney Frank, Republicans have squelched any dissent, especially as evidenced by the recent primary purge of any Republican who would dare show pragmatism, thus nominating "bug-eyed zealots" who go down to defeat in general elections.

Kabaservice starts his history with a brief summary of Republican politics up through the Roosevelt years, then slows down when Eisenhower, who today would be considered a moderate-to-liberal Republican, left office. After losing to Kennedy, the conservatives of the party gathered around Barry Goldwater, the right-wing senator from Arizona, who famously said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." What may seem surprising to learn in this day and age is that a large wing of the party fought tooth and nail to stop him. Moderate Republicans were represented largely by a group called the Ripon Society (which I was surprised to learn still exists today), that tried to coalesce around a single candidate--namely Nelson Rockefeller, the plutocratic governor of New York. Rockefeller, though, dithered as a candidate, and had recently divorced and remarried a much younger woman.

Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, and moderate Republicans saw doom: "In the wake of the 1964 election, the surviving Republicans took stock of the disaster, like shivering survivors of a flood surveying the hideous transformation of a once-familiar landscape." But, despite these signs of obsolescence, four years later a seemingly centrist Republican, Richard Nixon, took office (though perhaps helped largely by the fracturing Democrats). As the years went by, moderate Republicans faded away, and with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, almost ceased to be.

So what is a moderate Republican, and what happened to them? Kabaservice describes them as fiscally conservative and socially progressive. They included men like Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, Leverett Saltonstall, George Romney, Thomas Kuchel, William Steiger, and William Scranton. Largely they were remnants of old blue-blooded families of New England, Midwestern stalwarts (including Gerald Ford), and Jewish progressives such as Jacob Javits. They were for civil rights, and occasionally against the Vietnam War, but against unnecessary spending. When Reagan came into office, he subverted the meaning of conservatism, at least fiscally: "defense spending increased by over one-third between 1981 and 1985, and totaled $2 trillion over Reagan's eight years in office. The federal deficit tripled under Reagan, while the federal debt jumped from $900 billion to close to $3 trillion dollars. The United States went from being the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor."

How did this happen? Kabaservice blames much of it on the famed "Southern strategy" employed by Nixon, who sought to stoke fears of black power by focusing on white Southern voters, who for generations had been Democrats. This repulsed many Republicans, who switched parties. Indeed, the members of today's Ripon Society are a third Democrat and a third Independent. In a topsy-turvy example of the changing demographics of today's voter, the deep south is predominantly Republican, while the one time Republican sronghold of New England had zero G.O.P. congressmen after the 2008 election.

Kabaservice speeds things up after the Nixon years; the period from 1970 to today is covered in only two chapters, perhaps because there almost was no impact by moderate Republicans. Lowell Weicker was the last progressive Republican senator. He holds special contempt for the Tea Party, and notes the aphorism that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, by detailing the Republican race for Senate to replace Joe Biden in Delaware. Mike Castle, a two-term governor and nine-term congressman, was a pragmatic Republican, but daring to reach across the aisle, and suggest that Barack Obama was a U.S. citizen, caused an insurgent Tea Party response, with Christine O'Donnell, a comically unqualified candidate, taking the nomination, turning a sure-fire Republican win into a defeat. He could have written the same about Sharron Angle in Nevada, or Richard Mourdock in Indiana--the Tea Party has cost Republicans at least five senate seats.

Kabaservice really puts venom in his pen for the extremists. It took a long time for Republicans to weed out crazies like the John Birch Society, whom even William F. Buckley called "kooks": "Now tea-tinged conservative entertainers like Glenn Beck peddled the crackpot theories of Birch theoreticians like W. Cleon Skousen to a television audience of millions, and books of the sort that once had been viewed as the political equivalent of hardcore pornography soared brazenly up the bestseller lists."

The book was written just before the 2012 election, and Kabaservice, like a Cassandra, sees the writing on the wall, with Mitt Romney running from his moderate past to out-flank the other candidates, only to lose in November. Throughout the book, the Democrats are outsiders to the story, like the small and insignificant mammals in the last day of the mighty dinosaurs. But those mammals had the last laugh, while the dinosaurs became extinct. Kabaservice sees the same future for Republicans, unless they expand their way of thinking to a more diverse body. It's hard to imagine that happening.